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Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy.

Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in...

Review

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil is one of the most ambitious works of political theory to emerge from the study of energy and empire in the early twenty-first century. Timothy Mitchell, a political scientist at Columbia University, constructs a sweeping argument that connects the material properties of fossil fuels — how they are extracted, transported, and consumed — to the rise, shape, and limits of modern democratic politics. The book refuses the conventional framing of oil as merely a commodity whose revenues corrupt or enrich, and instead insists that we follow the carbon itself: through coal seams and pipelines, refineries and shipping lanes, currency systems and economic theories, arms deals and mandate commissions. The result is a work that redraws the intellectual map connecting energy, finance, imperialism, and democratic possibility.

Mitchell opens with a deceptively simple observation: the rise of mass democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with the coal age, and this was not incidental. Coal had to be mined underground by autonomous workers, hauled along fixed rail lines, loaded by dockworkers, and stoked by engine crews. This created what Mitchell calls "narrow, purpose-built channels" of concentrated energy flow, with choke points at every junction. Workers positioned at these critical nodes — miners, railwaymen, dockers — could paralyse entire energy systems through coordinated strikes. Their power derived not primarily from shared consciousness or ideological solidarity, but from the socio-technical properties of coal itself: its weight, its concentration in specific seams, its dependence on fixed rail infrastructure, and the large human labour force required to move it. The general strike, Mitchell argues, was a "political machine" assembled out of coal flows. From the German mining strikes of 1889 that forced Kaiser Wilhelm into labour reforms, to the British Triple Alliance of 1911-12 that linked miners, railwaymen, and transport workers, to the Baku oil workers who launched the 1905 Russian Revolution, Mitchell traces how the physical infrastructure of coal production enabled democratic claims that would have been inconceivable under earlier energy regimes.

This argument is strongest in Chapter 1, "Machines of Democracy," which builds its case with careful attention to both the technical details of coal production and the specific historical sequences of labour mobilisation. Mitchell draws productively on Carter Goodrich's 1925 study of miners' workplace autonomy, showing how the room-and-pillar method gave miners decision-making power underground that translated into political militancy above. He is also astute on the colonial dimensions of coal-powered industrialisation: the energy concentration made possible by coal required the parallel expansion of colonial agriculture to supply raw materials and food, creating what he calls a relationship between "fossil-fuel-driven mass production in the towns and cities of Europe" and "extensive, solar-based production" in the colonies. Democracy and empire were not opposites but co-products of the same energy system.

The book's central pivot comes with the transition from coal to oil. Mitchell argues — with considerable documentary evidence — that this transition was deliberately engineered, in part, to weaken the democratic power that coal workers had assembled. The Marshall Plan, he shows, devoted over ten per cent of its funds to subsidising European oil purchases, making it "the largest single use of Marshall Plan money." The European Coal and Steel Community was explicitly designed to reduce the number of coal miners and facilitate cross-border coal supply to prevent effective strikes. The US funded the construction of oil refineries across Europe and subsidised the building of roads and automobile manufacturing. The stated goal, as Mitchell documents through diplomatic and corporate archives, was to make Western Europe dependent on Middle Eastern oil rather than domestic coal, thereby permanently weakening the political leverage of organised labour.

Oil, Mitchell argues, possessed fundamentally different political properties from coal. It required fewer workers per unit of energy produced. It flowed through pipelines rather than rail lines, eliminating the coal heavers and stokers whose labour had been essential to the movement of energy. Pipelines, he notes, "were introduced in Pennsylvania in the 1860s to circumvent the wage demands of the teamsters." Oil could be shipped across oceans in tankers registered under flags of convenience, beyond the reach of labour regulations. Unlike coal's dendritic networks with their choke points, oil followed grid-like networks where supply could be rerouted around blockages. The oil workers of Dhahran, Abadan, and Kirkuk fought bravely for labour rights and political freedoms, but the socio-technical properties of oil made it far harder for their struggles to paralyse energy systems and extract democratic concessions.

Chapter 2, "The Prize from Fairyland," overturns the heroic narrative of oil discovery in the Middle East. Mitchell demonstrates that the major oil companies — Deutsche Bank, Burmah Oil, Shell, Anglo-Persian (BP) — were not primarily interested in developing Middle Eastern oil but in delaying its development. Iraq's oil concession was held for decades without significant production. Deutsche Bank's acquisition of Mesopotamian oil rights in 1904 was followed by what the bank later acknowledged was "dilatory handling" carried out "for tactical reasons." Anglo-Persian discovered oil in Persia in 1908 but took years to build a pipeline, and resisted building refineries in Iraq for decades. The self-denying clause of the 1914 Turkish Petroleum Company agreement explicitly committed Europe's principal oil companies not to develop oil in the Ottoman Empire except jointly. Mitchell's argument that oil companies functioned as practitioners of what Thorstein Veblen called "sabotage" — restricting supply to maintain profits — is one of the book's most provocative and well-documented claims.

Chapters 3 and 4, on the mandate system and the construction of Iraqi statehood, are among the book's densest and most original. Mitchell traces how the British labour movement's wartime demand for the democratisation of international relations — including proposals for League of Nations control of colonial investment and raw materials — was translated by imperial architects like Jan Smuts into the very different principle of "self-determination." Whereas democratisation meant giving organised workers and their allies the institutional machinery to hold imperial power accountable, self-determination meant manufacturing the consent of the governed through native rulers and treaty arrangements. The mandate system, Mitchell argues, was "a machinery of consent" that replaced democratic mechanisms with the recognition of local despotisms through which imperial control would continue to operate. The South African origins of this framework — Smuts's experience with racial segregation, the Milner group's programme of white-ruled self-government — are traced with care, connecting the politics of gold mining in the Transvaal to the governance of oil in Mesopotamia.

Chapter 5, "Fuel Economy," is the book's most theoretically ambitious section, and perhaps its most important contribution to political thought. Mitchell argues that "the economy" as an object of political governance — the totalising concept measured by GNP and managed by Keynesian expertise — did not exist before the 1930s and 1940s. He traces the word's earlier meaning (frugal management, prudent government) through Adam Smith, William Jevons, and Friedrich List, showing that none of them referred to anything like the bounded, self-contained system of production and consumption that twentieth-century economics would take as its object. The economy, Mitchell argues, was made possible by oil. Cheap, abundant petroleum allowed economists to construct a framework of limitless growth by removing energy and natural resources from the calculative equation. National income accounting — measuring all instances of money changing hands — could expand without reference to the depletion of non-renewable resources or the costs of environmental destruction. The leading formulations of postwar economics — Keynes's General Theory, Hicks's Value and Capital, Samuelson's Foundations, the Arrow-Debreu model — paid no attention to the depletion of energy. This was not an oversight but a structural feature of a discipline built during the age of oil.

Mitchell also connects the Bretton Woods system to oil flows, arguing that the dollar's value as an international reserve currency depended on the fact that countries had to use dollars to purchase petroleum. Over ten per cent of Marshall Plan funds went to buying oil, and the pricing system ensured that Middle Eastern oil was sold at inflated American prices. "The value of the dollar as the basis of international finance depended on the flow of oil," Mitchell writes. When the oil companies' economist Eugene Birnbaum proposed abandoning the gold standard in 1967, it was an acknowledgement that oil, not gold, was the real foundation of international finance.

Chapters 6 and 7 trace the unravelling of the postwar petroleum order through the struggles over Iraqi oil, the rise of OPEC, the fabrication of the 1973 energy crisis, and the emergence of neoliberalism. Mitchell's account of Iraq Petroleum Company's deliberate suppression of Iraqi oil production is devastating. BP "deliberately drilled shallow wells to avoid discovering additional supplies, and plugged wildcat wells that yielded large finds to conceal their existence from the government." The company estimated that the North Rumaila field near Basra "might be the largest or second-largest oilfield in the world" but kept this secret from the Iraqi government. When Iraq passed Law 80 in 1960 to expropriate the concession area, the oil companies "resolved to wait out Qasim, hoping for a change of government" — which arrived via CIA-assisted coup in 1963.

Mitchell's treatment of the 1973-74 crisis is characteristically revisionist. He argues that what is remembered as an "oil crisis" was actually the convergence of multiple engineered transformations: the fabrication of an "energy crisis" by oil companies buying up rival energy sources and manipulating natural gas supplies; the US government's deliberate blocking of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations; the need to raise oil prices to open new production in Alaska and the North Sea; and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. The Arab oil embargo, Mitchell argues, "never happened" in any effective sense, since interruptions from one source were made up from others. What did happen was that the crisis provided the occasion for a fundamental reorganisation of the mechanisms governing oil prices, international finance, and democratic politics — opening the way for the neoliberal movement, funded by American oil fortunes (the Mellon-Scaife, Koch, and other families), to dismantle the Keynesian management of the economy and replace it with "the market" as a technology of rule.

Chapter 8, "McJihad," is the book's most provocative contribution to contemporary political debate. Mitchell argues that the standard framing of "Jihad vs. McWorld" — Islamic particularism versus capitalist globalisation — fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between political Islam and the oil economy. The muwahhidun (Wahhabis) were not external to or in conflict with Western capitalism; they were essential to its operation. The political control of Saudi Arabia — and thus the maintenance of the system of scarcity on which global oil profits depended — required the social force and moral authority of the muwahhidun movement. "McWorld, it turns out, was really McJihad, a necessary combination of a variety of social logics and forces." Mitchell traces this alliance from St John Philby's conversion to Wahhabism and his role brokering the Standard Oil concession, through Aramco's collaboration with the Ikhwan-derived National Guard to suppress labour protests, to the Saudi-funded revival of Islamic movements abroad as a weapon against Arab nationalism. The concept of McJihad reveals "the absence" of a self-sufficient capitalist logic — the fact that oil profits could be secured only through arrangements that relied on dynamic but seemingly uncapitalist social forces.

The book's conclusion on peak oil and climate change extends the argument into the present. Mitchell shows how the measuring of oil reserves — conducted privately, field by field, by rival companies — has been kept deliberately imprecise, in contrast to the increasingly accurate measurement of atmospheric CO2. He traces the repeated attempts to dismantle Charles Keeling's atmospheric measuring programme — by Congress, the Weather Bureau, the NSF, and the Department of Energy — and contrasts this with the "fractured and privatised nature of oilfield data" that prevents the emergence of a science of peak oil. The turn to unconventional oil — shale, tar sands — and unconventional gas produced by hydraulic fracturing represents an attempt to maintain what Mitchell calls the calculative space of economics between nature and politics, but one that necessarily fails as toxic propants contaminate drinking water and strip mining devastates landscapes.

The book has weaknesses. Mitchell's theoretical apparatus — drawing on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, Michel Callon's sociology of markets, and Jacques Ranciere's politics of distribution — sometimes sits uneasily with the detailed historical narrative. The argument about "the economy" as a mid-twentieth-century invention, while provocative, risks overstating the novelty of national income accounting and understating the continuities with earlier forms of economic governance. The treatment of political Islam, while brilliantly framed, necessarily compresses complex intellectual and social movements into functional roles within the oil economy. And the book's scope — from Newcomen's steam engine to Tahrir Square — means that some arguments receive less evidentiary support than others.

But these are minor complaints about a work of extraordinary ambition and originality. Carbon Democracy is that rare academic book that genuinely changes how one thinks about its subject. By insisting that we follow the carbon — through mines, pipelines, refineries, currency systems, economic theories, and political movements — Mitchell reveals connections between energy, finance, empire, and democracy that remain invisible to conventional analysis. The book's central insight — that democratic politics was not just enabled but materially shaped by the properties of fossil fuels, and that the transition from coal to oil systematically weakened the mechanisms through which democratic claims could be made effective — has implications that extend far beyond the Middle East or the history of energy. It is an essential work for understanding both the achievements and the limits of modern democratic politics, and for thinking about what might come after the age of carbon.

Reviewed 2026-04-23

Notable Quotes

Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of modern democracy and its limits.

Opening line of the Introduction, stating the book's central thesis about the co-production of carbon energy and democratic politics. — democracy, fossil fuels, energy politics, central thesis

What was missing was not consciousness, not a repertoire of demands, but an effective way of forcing the powerful to listen to those demands. The flow and concentration of energy made it possible to connect the demands of miners to those of others, and to give their arguments a technical force that could not easily be ignored.

Chapter 1, explaining why coal miners' power was not about ideology but about their position within energy infrastructure. — coal miners, political power, energy infrastructure, sabotage

Workers were gradually connected together not so much by the weak ties of a class culture, collective ideology or political organisation, but by the increasing and highly concentrated quantities of carbon energy they mined, loaded, carried, stoked and put to work.

Chapter 1, summarizing how political power emerged from energy networks rather than from class consciousness. — labor, energy, class, political agency

An important goal of the conversion to oil was to permanently weaken the coal miners, whose ability to interrupt the flow of energy had given organised labour the power to demand the improvements to collective life that had democratised Europe.

Chapter 1, on the Marshall Plan's subsidy of the transition from coal to oil as a deliberate anti-democratic strategy. — Marshall Plan, coal to oil, labor power, anti-democratic

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again... there need be no more unemployment.

Keynes's famous passage from The General Theory, which Mitchell uses in Chapter 5 to show how economic thinking replaced material limits with monetary circulation. — Keynes, economics, coal, dematerialization

The main feature of Middle Eastern oil throughout the twentieth century was that there was always too much of it. To be more precise, there was too much of it in too few locations.

Chapter 2, establishing that the oil companies' central problem was managing abundance through artificial scarcity. — oil abundance, scarcity, Middle East, corporate control

Oil pipelines were invented as a means of reducing the ability of humans to interrupt the flow of energy. They were introduced in Pennsylvania in the 1860s to circumvent the wage demands of the teamsters who transported barrels of oil to the rail depot in horse-drawn wagons.

Chapter 1, on how the physical infrastructure of oil was designed from the outset to limit worker power. — pipelines, labor power, technology, anti-worker

Whereas the movement of coal tended to follow dendritic networks, with branches at each end but a single main channel, creating potential choke points at several junctures, oil flowed along networks that often had the properties of a grid, like an electricity network, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of energy can switch to avoid blockages or overcome breakdowns.

Chapter 1, explaining the technical difference between coal and oil networks and why oil was less vulnerable to worker disruption. — energy networks, coal versus oil, vulnerability, grid systems

The 'dilatory handling of the whole affair', Deutsche Bank acknowledged twenty years later, 'was carried out for tactical reasons.'

Chapter 2, where Deutsche Bank admits that delays in developing Iraqi oil were deliberate sabotage of production. — Iraq, oil sabotage, Deutsche Bank, delayed development

The problem in Iraq was how to create 'some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won't cost very much, that Labour can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our political and economic interests will be secure.'

Chapter 4, Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office describing the cynical calculus behind Iraqi 'self-determination.' — Iraq, self-determination, imperialism, consent manufacturing

Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he gives the impression of being civilized.

Chapter 4, a British official's statement reflecting the racial structure underlying the mandate system in Iraq. — racism, colonialism, mandate system, dehumanization

The world 'energy crisis' or 'energy shortage' is a fiction. But belief in the fiction is a fact. It makes people accept higher oil prices as imposed by nature, when they are really fixed by collusion.

Chapter 7, oil economist Morris Adelman challenging the official narrative of the 1973 crisis. — energy crisis, fabrication, collusion, oil prices

Arms were particularly suited to this task of financial recycling, for their acquisition was not limited by their usefulness.

Chapter 6, on why weapons became the ideal mechanism for recycling petrodollars -- their uselessness was their advantage. — arms trade, petrodollar recycling, militarism, Middle East

Since arms sales were useful for their uselessness, and there was no precedent for the volume of weapons sold, they needed a special apparatus of justification.

Chapter 6, on how doctrines of 'national security' were fabricated to rationalize unlimited arms purchases. — arms sales, security doctrine, justification, military-industrial complex

We live in an age, to adapt Barber's nomenclature, of 'McJihad'. It is an age in which the mechanisms of what we call capitalism appear to operate, in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements.

Chapter 8, introducing Mitchell's concept that political Islam is not external to but constitutive of global oil capitalism. — McJihad, political Islam, capitalism, Saudi Arabia

The political economy of oil did not happen, in some incidental way, to rely on a government in Saudi Arabia that owed its own power to the force of an Islamic political movement. Given the features of the political economy of oil... oil profits depended on working with those forces that could guarantee the political control of Arabia.

Chapter 8, arguing that the muwahhidun were structurally necessary, not merely convenient allies, for the global oil industry. — Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, oil profits, structural necessity

In any discussions with the Shah, it is important that they be kept on the basis of fundamental national objectives, rather than allow it to take the appearance of a sales plan.

Chapter 6, arms manufacturer Northrop Corporation instructing its agents to disguise commercial arms sales as strategic policy. — arms sales, Iran, deception, military-industrial complex

The embargo against the United States 'never happened'.

Chapter 7, Mitchell's provocative claim that the 1973 Arab oil embargo was functionally ineffective because supply cuts were offset by other producers. — oil embargo, 1973 crisis, fabrication, supply and demand

The economy came into being as an object of calculation and a means of governing populations not with the political economy of the late eighteenth century or the new academic economics of the late nineteenth century, but only in the mid-twentieth century. Its appearance was made possible by oil.

Conclusion, arguing that 'the economy' as we know it is a mid-20th century invention enabled by cheap fossil fuels. — the economy, oil, governance, economic expertise

We are entering the declining decades of the fossil-fuel era, that brief episode of human time when coal miners and oil workers moved an extraordinary quantity of energy, buried underground in coal seams and hydrocarbon traps, up to the earth's surface.

Opening of the Conclusion, framing the entire fossil fuel era as a brief, anomalous interlude in human history. — peak oil, fossil fuels, historical perspective, decline

Democracy is sometimes described as a consequence of this change, emerging as the rapid growth of industrial life destroyed older forms of authority and power. The ability to make democratic political claims, however, was not just a by-product of the rise of coal. People forged successful political demands by acquiring a power of action from within the new energy system.

Chapter 1, distinguishing Mitchell's argument from conventional accounts: democracy emerged not from industrialization generally but from specific vulnerabilities in coal-based energy systems. — democracy, coal, agency, energy systems

A single litre of petrol used today needed about twenty-five metric tons of ancient marine life as precursor material, or that organic matter equivalent to all of the plant and animal life produced over the entire earth for four hundred years was required to produce the fossil fuels we burn today in a single year.

Chapter 1, illustrating the extraordinary compression of space and time represented by fossil fuels. — fossil fuels, energy density, geological time, unsustainability

If people have a voice in the making of the regulations which affect them, they are more able to understand and accept law.

Chapter 1, large American firms describing their company unions as 'industrial democracy' -- a term designed to forestall genuine worker power. — industrial democracy, company unions, Rockefeller Plan, labor control

The purpose of the new monetary system was to 'limit the control which certain private bankers have in the past exercised over international finance' and drive 'the usurious money lenders from the temple of international finance.'

Chapter 5, US Treasury Secretary Morgenthau at Bretton Woods, describing the goal of curbing financial speculation -- a goal that oil would both serve and undermine. — Bretton Woods, finance, speculation, dollar-oil nexus

Nature is a term we should abandon, for it is a way of assembling the common world 'without due process.' The appeal to nature shortcuts political debate and contestation.

Conclusion, Mitchell drawing on Latour to argue that the nature-society divide enables technocratic control and prevents democratic engagement with questions of energy and climate. — nature-society divide, Latour, expertise, democratic theory

Pipelines were introduced in Pennsylvania in the 1860s to circumvent the wage demands of the teamsters who transported barrels of oil to the rail depot in horse-drawn wagons.

Chapter 1, on how oil infrastructure was designed from the start to reduce worker leverage — oil, labour, technology, anti-democratic design

The oil companies were learning to portray their needs as furthering the imperial interests of the state, and thus contributing to the well-being of the nation.

Chapter 2, summarizing how private oil interests repackaged themselves as national strategic concerns — imperialism, oil companies, state power, propaganda

Democratic politics is a recent phenomenon. The development of the two kinds of power has been interwoven from the start.

Introduction, on the inseparability of democratic politics and carbon energy — democracy, energy, fossil fuels, modernity

If democracy is an idea, then countries become democratic by the idea getting into people's heads. The problem of democracy becomes a question of how to manufacture a new model of the citizen, one whose mind is committed to the idea of democracy.

Introduction, critiquing the conception of democracy as an exportable idea rather than a material practice — democracy, ideology, imperialism, Iraq

The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in the history of industrial societies to reorganise economic and political life so that it was not dependent on the ability of workers to disrupt the supply of energy.

Introduction, on how oil's properties undermined the democratic leverage coal had created — oil, democracy, labour, energy transition

The transformation of oil into large and unaccountable government incomes is not a cause of the problem of democracy and oil, but the outcome of particular ways of engineering political relations out of flows of energy.

Introduction, rejecting the 'oil curse' as a simple explanation and insisting on following the carbon — oil curse, democracy, political engineering, energy

Churchill's prize was not a gift from fairyland, but an energy source to be produced by oil workers in Persia and Mesopotamia.

Chapter 2, on Churchill's famous claim about Anglo-Persian oil as a 'prize from fairyland' — imperialism, oil, labour, Churchill

The goal of oil companies was to place themselves in control of the conduits, processing points and bottlenecks through which oil had to flow, to restrict the development of rival channels, beginning with oil wells themselves, and to use this command of obligatory passage points to convert the flow of oil into profits.

Chapter 1, on oil companies as practitioners of Veblenian sabotage — oil companies, sabotage, monopoly, capitalism

The economy came into being as an object of calculation and a means of governing populations not with the political economy of the late eighteenth century or the new academic economics of the late nineteenth century, but only in the mid-twentieth century.

Chapter 5, arguing that 'the economy' as we know it is a recent invention made possible by cheap oil — economics, the economy, oil, governance, modernity

McWorld, it turns out, was really McJihad, a necessary combination of a variety of social logics and forces.

Chapter 8, reversing the conventional Jihad vs. McWorld framework — political Islam, capitalism, Saudi Arabia, oil

The purchase of most goods sooner or later reaches a limit where no more of the commodity can be used and further acquisition is impossible to justify. Weapons, on the other hand, could be purchased to be stored up rather than used, and came with their own forms of justification.

Chapter 6, on why arms sales were uniquely suited to recycling petrodollars — arms trade, petrodollars, militarism, Middle East

The 'world energy crisis' or 'energy shortage' is a fiction. But belief in the fiction is a fact. It makes people accept higher oil prices as imposed by nature, when they are really fixed by collusion.

Chapter 7, quoting oil economist Morris Adelman on the fabricated nature of the 1973 crisis — energy crisis, oil prices, collusion, fabrication

They are unfortunately the workers and in every country the future belongs to the worker.

Chapter 3, quoting J.X. Merriman on why black South Africans could not simply be ignored in constructing the new colonial order — labour, colonialism, South Africa, race

The problem in Iraq was how to create 'some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won't cost very much, that Labour can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our political and economic interests will be secure'.

Chapter 4, quoting a senior India Office official on the purpose of Iraqi self-determination — imperialism, Iraq, self-determination, mandate system

Oil contributed to the new conception of the economy as an object that could grow without limit. Oil declined continuously in price. Adjusting for inflation, the price of a barrel of oil in 1970 was one-third of what it had sold for in 1920.

Chapter 5, on how cheap oil made limitless economic growth thinkable — economics, growth, oil prices, the economy

The development of neoliberalism was delayed by the war and the programmes of postwar reconstruction. Its political challenge to the Keynesian apparatus got gradually underway a decade later, in modest form, with the founding of a think tank in London in 1955 called the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Chapter 5, tracing the origins of neoliberalism to the crisis of sterling oil — neoliberalism, economics, oil, think tanks

Fossil fuels are not about to run out, but two predicaments make the world they engineered unexpectedly fragile.

Conclusion, introducing the twin crises of peak oil and climate change — peak oil, climate change, fossil fuels, fragility

A larger limit that oil represents for democracy is that the political machinery that emerged to govern the age of fossil fuels, partly as a product of those forms of energy, may be incapable of addressing the events that will end it.

Introduction, on the fundamental challenge fossil fuel decline poses to democratic governance — democracy, fossil fuels, limits, climate change